A power in the NHL, Bill Wirtz dies at 77

Thursday

Sep 27, 2007 at 12:01 AMSep 27, 2007 at 3:08 AM

Wirtz, who anguished over losses on the ice as much as or more than he did losses at the box office, died early Wednesday morning. He was 77. The team announced he died at Evanston Hospital after a short battle with cancer.

Tim Cronin

William W. Wirtz was one of Chicago’s most successful businessmen but never saw the crown jewel of his family-owned empire, the Blackhawks, win hockey’s Stanley Cup after he and his family took full control of the franchise in the mid-1960s. Instead, he saw the team fall from perennial playoff contender to also-ran.

Wirtz, who anguished over losses on the ice as much as or more than he did losses at the box office, died early Wednesday morning. He was 77. The team announced he died at Evanston Hospital after a short battle with cancer.

Elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1976 as a builder, Wirtz was a persuasive voice in the National Hockey League boardroom for decades. As chairman of the NHL’s board of governors for 18 years, he had at least as much power as president John Ziegler or players’ association chief Alan Eagleson, both of whom were close friends.

While remaining a member of the league’s executive committee, he was less visible in league affairs after suffering a massive stroke in February 1995. Close to death for a few days, he fought back and made a nearly complete recovery, but he began to delegate day-to-day authority of his businesses to his sons.

Still, Wirtz never relinquished the final say on any matter, whether it concerned the Hawks, the family’s lucrative liquor distributorships or its vast real estate holdings.

Nor did he lose his penchant for speaking from the heart. In September 1999, Wirtz, incensed that Washington general manager George McPhee had sucker-punched Lorne Molleken, then the Hawks’ head coach, after a preseason game, jumped on the phone to reporters. He challenged McPhee and Capitals head coach Ron Wilson to a fight.

“I was an amateur boxer, and I’ve had a stroke,” Wirtz barked. “If either one of those gentlemen want to come in and go in a room and turn the light out. ... I’d be only too happy to see them.”

It was vintage Wirtz, chin out and fists clenched, confident in the belief that men should settle their differences as men and let the chips fall where they may, even at age 70.

“Bill Wirtz was a giant presence in a giant city, his beloved Chicago, and an even greater presence in the National Hockey League,” NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said in a statement.“His 41 years as president of the Blackhawks and 18 years as Chairman of the Board leave an incomparable legacy of contributions to the game and to the League. His strength, intelligence, character and passion have been ingrained indelibly in the Blackhawks, in the League and in me. Bill was a true icon and a great competitor.”

Wirtz’s last appearance at a Blackhawks function was in June, at the signing of top draft choice Patrick Kane. He was jovial, posing with Kane’s family and believing his hockey team was about to rebound.

In business, Wirtz expected to get his way, going to extremes to shift the balance in his favor as often as possible. The most outlandish recent example came in 1999, when he convinced the state Legislature to pass a bill guaranteeing contract renewals between liquor makers and wholesale distributors, including Judge & Dolph, a major holding of the family-owned Wirtz Corp. It once controlled half the liquor contracts in Nevada, but suffered setbacks, and Wirtz didn’t want that duplicated in Illinois.

Wirtz had hired more than a dozen lobbyists, including former Gov. James Thompson, to strong-arm lawmakers to see his side of the issue. Distributors contributed about $700,000 to campaign chests while the bill was being considered.

The bill passed, and liquor prices went up soon after. The law was challenged early in 2000, and Gov. George Ryan withdrew his support shortly before it was declared unconstitutional by a U.S. District Court judge.

The scrap was the most public for a non-sports business Wirtz had seen in years. Most of the time, when he was in the news, it had been because of the family’s hockey team.

“The Wirtzes feel you pay to keep your name out of the paper, not in the paper,” he said during an extensive interview in 1991. “Some people, they own a restaurant or a coal company, they buy a club to get notoriety. We’re the old-fashioned kind of owner.”

As such, criticism didn’t bother him in the least.

“You’re fair game all the time,” Wirtz said. “Fans are not in the business of loving owners. We’re prepared to take criticism.”

It generally came in two areas: failing to spend enough to make the Hawks a winner, and barring telecasts of Hawks home games in an era when everything else was televised.

He certainly can be faulted on the latter charge. Like his father, Arthur, before him, Wirtz believed that home television was giving away the product. Only when network contracts forced a local broadcast or when special circumstances made it worthwhile, such as the final regular-season game at Chicago Stadium, did Wirtz allow Hawks home games on free or basic cable TV.

Otherwise, they were either not seen at all, or televised on a pay-TV basis, either via theater TV in the 1960s and 1970s or on pay-cable in recent years. Wirtz’s belief was in protecting the gate.

“It’s season reservations first, season reservations second, season reservations third,” Wirtz said more than once. “Never compromise your season reservations. They pay for everything.”

The other argument, that Wirtz pinched pennies, was incorrect. Once player salaries became public knowledge in the late 1980s, Wirtz spent more freely than his harshest critics believed, though he refused to participate in free agency to any great degree, and the team’s fortunes suffered as a result.

Beginning in 1994, the salaries were bankrolled in part by the team’s move into the United Center, an arena co-owned by his family and the Bulls’ ownership, led by Jerry Reinsdorf, even though Wirtz was the largest shareholder, with 18 percent of the team.

The new building replaced Chicago Stadium, something of a Wirtz family heirloom, only because Wirtz saw the skybox-driven future of professional sports in 1988, when the Palace of Auburn Hills opened near Detroit.

“It obsoletes every other arena,” Wirtz said of the Palace, considering the bottom line more than the sight lines.

The prospect of more revenue didn’t make it easy for Wirtz to see the Stadium go. He grew up in the building and didn’t want to come to the Feb. 3, 1995, ceremony that marked the beginning of the end of “the old barn.” He showed up only because CNN wanted an interview during the demolition. His stroke occurred within the month.

Born Oct. 4, 1929, Wirtz grew up the oldest son of Arthur M. Wirtz, a real estate and liquor tycoon who made much of his fortune by buying properties for pennies on the dollar during the Great Depression. That’s how Chicago Stadium, built in 1929 for $6 million, came into the hands of Wirtz and partner James Norris in 1935 for $300,000.

In 1950, Wirtz graduated from Brown University and joined the family business, which at that time included the International Boxing Club, in earnest. The Wirtz family was, with Norris, a power in the NHL already, including a minority interest in the Hawks that became controlling ownership in 1954.

Critics dubbed the NHL the Norris House League, and with reason. Over the years, they bought the Detroit Red Wings and New York Rangers, the buildings they played in, arenas in St. Louis, Minneapolis and Omaha, and held the mortgage on Boston Garden.

When the Hawks won the Stanley Cup in 1961, they did so by beating the co-owned Red Wings.

Only in 1966, when James Norris Jr. died, dissolving the partnership and giving the Wirtzes complete control in Chicago, did Bill Wirtz come into the public eye as president of the Hawks. Since then, the Hawks are 0-for-3 in the championship round, their most recent trip to the Stanley Cup Final coming in 1992.

“We think about that a lot,” Wirtz once said of the close calls. “We could have won three or four in the ’60s, outside of ’61. We had dynamite clubs. One year, we had five of six first-team All-Stars. We might have had an attitude that we were a little better than what we were.”

In recent years, the team fell on hard times, missing the playoffs eight times in nine seasons across 10 years, the extra year the lockout of players by the owners in a to-the-death fight over control of revenue. A bottom-liner whose nickname of “Dollar Bill” was apt, Wirtz was in favor of the lockout from the start, noting before last season the team lost $19 million in 2003-04, the final season before the lockout; lost as much in 2005-06, when the NHL resumed play; and expected to lose at least $20 million in 2006-07.

“In spite of the last decade, he was upbeat and positive and caring, the same way he was when we were successful,” Hawks general manager Dale Tallon said. “He never changed, and that tells you what kind of a man he was. I loved him like a father.”

“He took a lot of heat here over the years,” said Denis Savard, a former Hawks star and now the team’s coach. “But people don’t know him like I do. He’s just a family guy, and he loves his players and loves the people that work for him.”

Wirtz quickly rose to power within the close-knit NHL. He was elected chairman of the league’s board of governors for nine two-year terms, the last seven served consecutively. Often, NHL meetings were held in Palm Beach, Fla., in the winter, and Wirtz would entertain his fellow owners on his massive yacht, the “Blackhawk.”

Wirtz’s 18 years covered the culmination of the battle with the upstart World Hockey Association, in which four WHA teams joined the NHL; and the 1980s, when the league was at low ebb in part because of a policy that turned its back on network TV.

Despite the lack of a Stanley Cup winner, Wirtz saw the Hawks fill the Stadium most of the time, except for a fallow period that extended from the mid-1970s until the arrival of Savard, a flashy center drafted in the summer of 1980. Savard’s arrival helped fill the void created by Bobby Hull’s jump to the WHA.

Wirtz, echoing his father, always argued that Hull could not be kept from going, because the WHA pooled money from its 12 teams to sign Hull to a million-dollar bonus. He always neglected to note that he or his father, who died in 1983, could have written a similar check personally.

The failure to keep Hull cost the Hawks dearly and contributed to skyrocketing salaries around the NHL, but Wirtz was always held in high regard by the league’s old guard. In 1978, two years after his Hall of Fame induction, he was awarded the Lester Patrick Trophy for service to hockey in the United States.

Less well known was his charitable side. For years, Wirtz was active in the affairs of Maryville Academy, the state’s largest private residential facility for wayward and disadvantaged children. He was also personally supportive of the wheelchair sports program at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (named after Virginia Wadsworth Wirtz, his mother), and the Amateur Hockey Association of Illinois, which has held its state championships in his arenas since 1990. Additionally, Blackhawks Charities, which he started in 1993, has donated over $7.5 million to various causes.

“Bill Wirtz was a giant of a man whose passing leaves a tremendous void in Chicago,” Reinsdorf said in a statement Wednesday. “It was an honor to have been his partner for over 25 years. He was a person of great integrity, loyalty and generosity.”

“I think that was a great name, ‘Dollar Bill.’ But they forgot to put the 100,000 or million in front of it, because that’s what he gave out,” Hall of Famer Stan Mikita said. “I can honestly say from my experience, because of the hockey camp that I run, every year, I got a nice check from him.”

While the family’s extensive holdings also include real estate, including the 333 N. Michigan Ave. office building, a large number of apartment buildings on the north side, an equipment rental firm, a travel agency and two banks, not everything Wirtz touched turned to gold.

Despite its location in the heart of the Loop, the Bismarck Hotel lost money for years until Wirtz sold it to a group that remodeled it. Wirtz’s father shuttered the adjoining Bismarck Theatre in the 1960s, displeased by the movies Hollywood was producing, and Bill Wirtz kept the doors closed, save an occasional boxing event.

Likewise, the family sold the American Furniture Mart, a mammoth building on Lake Shore Drive, after losing a long battle with the Kennedy family’s Merchandise Mart for dominance in that realm. The Wirtz Corp.’s main offices remain in the building.

Wirtz is survived by his wife, Alice, five grown children, W. Rockwell, Gail, Karey, Peter and Alyson, and seven grandchildren.

Visitation will be from 2 to 9 p.m. Sunday at Donnellan Family Funeral Home, 10045 Skokie Boulevard, Skokie. The funeral service will be at 10 a.m. Monday at Fourth Presbyterian Church, 126 E. Chestnut St., Chicago. Interment will be at Ivanhoe Cemetery.